The Shatter Between Heartbeats

Publisher's Note - Open Kimono Publishing

"The Shatter Between Heartbeats is not a book. It is a removal.

E.T. Vale granted us full publishing rights with a single request: that we follow every aspect of his design without compromise. Not to protect the work-but to survive it. This was something he needed to release. Memories he needed cut out from himself. To burn, so he could keep living.

When we first read it, we stopped reading. We witnessed it. It didn't feel like a collection of poems-it felt like a bystander's account of a private war. We weren't editors. We were there. Once you've witnessed something like this, silence becomes complicity.

The spine on the paperback is misaligned by instruction-objected to by us, but ultimately honored. An unspoken reference to an injury of his own. The matte hardcover remains unblurbed, as he insisted. The 24 poems trace a cycle that mirrors each hour of a day lived on repeat-without end.

This doesn't challenge literary convention. It rewrites it. Nothing was changed. Nothing was added. Nothing was smoothed for comfort. Our editor certified it. We honored it.

We knew releasing this would go against the rules of commercial publishing. But this was never about a product. It was about transmission. About letting readers feel what he feels. To see how the world arranges itself in his mind-and how that mind fractures and reforms, hour by hour.

This book may not be easy to hold.

But it is necessary.

Some books are written to be read.

This one was removed to be understood.

Once you witness it-you witness something rare: truth.

Not the polished kind. The kind that trembles. The kind the world keeps trying to bury.

We are the calloused hands fighting off the shovel."

-Open Kimono Publishing